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I’ve been making a full time living for the past 17 years in the comfort of my own home. This is all because of affiliate marketing.
You might be thinking, what does affiliate marketing have to do with me? I’m a YouTube publisher. How is this going to help? Keep reading and you’ll find out.
A lot of people think that YouTube is all about AdSense, running ads, sponsors, and selling your own stuff. And they think that affiliate marketing is just selling other peoples’ products.
For the last 17 years, I’ve made money with affiliate marketing in weird little niches—smiley faces, gas prices, little mouse cursors, downloadable programs, and things like that. I’ve made millions of dollars with these types of programs, and I want to talk to you about how that works, and how you can use affiliate marketing to build a funnel on your YouTube channel so that you can get paid big time.
Affiliate marketing can involve selling other peoples’ products through ClickBank, Commission Junction, or other platforms like that. But, that’s not always the case. While selling a product is a good thing to do, we want to take a look at CPA affiliate marketing.
CPA Marketing
With CPA (cost-per-action) marketing, we get paid when users perform an action.
For example, I have a sobriety YouTube channel which talks about learning how to stay sober. On this channel, I actually run an offer where you get paid if someone makes a phone call. If you’re an affiliate and you get someone to make a 90 second phone call, you can make anywhere from $175 to $600. No one even has to buy anything.
Offers like this happen all over the web. With CPA marketing, you can make money in lots of ways—when someone clicks a link, downloads something (sometimes for free), when people fill out lead forms, and more. As an affiliate marketer, you don’t have to just “sell” products. There are hundreds of thousands of CPA affiliate offers you can use to make big money.
But how does that tie into YouTube? What are we doing here?
YouTube
The name of the game in affiliate marketing is being able to drive traffic. This sounds a lot like YouTube, where you’re driving views. Obviously, not all views are created equal, but you have the ability to drive views to something.
I’ve been publishing my videos on YouTube for over 10 years, and I’ve been using my videos to get people to offers.
For example, if I say to my YouTube subscribers, “go here to download something,” that’s an example of driving traffic. (If you downloaded this report after watching my video, then that’s driving traffic in action.)
As YouTube publishers and affiliate marketers, we want to take people from our videos and drive them to the stuff that makes money.
The Blog
Your blog is a really important part of this process. On your blog is where you run your affiliate offers. You can also use your blog to get attention–people will come back to it. People don’t always check out every single video you post on YouTube. You have to remind them, and the blog will allow you to do that. You can also use your blog to build a mailing list. This is key, because you can email people when you come out with a new video, a new offer, all kinds of things.
So, you want to take your viewers and give them something of value. What can you give them? A printable, an extra video, behind the scenes, a report (like this one)? How can you give them something of value?
Here’s an example of Lowes providing some extra value to their customers.
As another example, one of the YouTube videos I did years ago was about how to download YouTube videos. I found out there was a toolbar at The Affiliate Network. That toolbar was free for users. This company that had the toolbar was paying me $2.75 per download. So, I was able to make lots of money, at no cost to the users.
There are lots of offers out there, but you have to be creative and think about your market.
Here’s another example. If I had a YouTube channel and I was talking about inspiration, or Bible verses or Bible quotes – these are huge videos that make lots of money – I could take them to a Bible toolbar, or something like that.
For one more example, imagine if I were in the market for how to fix pipes. I recently had an issue with the pipes in my house where I had to replace them all. I looked up some YouTube videos for how to fix pipes, and I saw that 100,000 people a month search for these videos. So, if I made about video about “how to fix pipes” or “how to detect a leak” or “how to know where a leak is coming from”, I could take my traffic to a plumber form. And lots of companies, like Angie’s List, Home Advisors and others that are national brands, are willing to pay you for that, sometimes as much as $20 – $40 for one person to fill out the form. So you can see, this adds up. If I get 10 of these a day, then I’m making $400 a day, and a decent 6-figures-a-year income.
Right now, so many people on YouTube are relying on ads that are generated automatically, those that are there in the video. But the fact of the matter is, no one’s there to watch the ads. They’re there to watch you. This is your audience, and they are worthwhile to you. So, you have to build your influence.
Influence
What do I mean by influence?
The name of the game in affiliate marketing is being able to send people to wherever you want. If you can do that, then you have influence.
I recently held a livestream. I took my mailing list people and sent them to my live stream and said, “check this out.” We had about 90 -140 people on that livestream at any given time. How well did it do?
Well, because of the influence, we were able to make an average of $55 per viewer. That means, if we had 150 people each day, we made a decent amount of income just from the livestream. We also made money on the replay and the back end.
The key is understanding your audience, and no one knows your audience as much as you do. Whether you’re doing cat videos, Bible videos, videos about how to make money, or videos about how to have a better life. Whatever it is, we can find what’s going to please your audience and make money.
By creating influence, you get people to do the things that you want them to do. The more influence you have, the more you’re going to make in the marketplace. The way that you gain that influence is by telling people to do something for a reason.
If you went to affiliatemarketingdude.com/nick and downloaded this report from the site, then you will hopefully like this report, start to trust me more, like my videos, and down the road perhaps buy something, or check out my blog. This is me building influence.
Now, that’s the name of the game. It’s taking people and building something of value. Your blog is going to be critical—it’s like a revolving cycle of money-making. You’re going to take people and drive them to your blog, build your mailing list, get a new video, put that video on your blog, then take that mailing list and send them back to it.
The more and more people come back to your blog, the more they’ll get to know you. They’ll look at the other stuff you have available, they’ll perform actions that will make you money.
YouTube: Monetize Your Views
There are lots of ways you can take the views you’ve gotten off YouTube and monetize them. The average right now is about $2 per 1,000 views. That’s about 0.002 cents. It’s very low.
So, ask yourself: In those 1,000 views, can I make more than 2 dollars? In those 1,000 views could I get someone to go to a product, like a free toolbar? If one person downloads it, that’s three bucks, and I’m already ahead of the game. How many can I get to download it out of 1,000 views? Maybe 20, maybe 50, maybe even 100? That’s still 10 percent, and it’s only a free toolbar.
Find out what your viewers really want, and promote related offers that make sense.
Right now on the internet, people are paying lots of money for lots of different things – downloads, clicks, sales (Google makes like 60 billion dollars a year off of paid search ads). What drives these ads (called PPC, or pay-per click) is people being able to generate leads. These companies and people who pay for traffic want to get leads. It’s all about generating leads for the marketplace, and you can make a lot of money doing this.
Learn how all this works, because gone are the days of making pennies (or tenths of pennies) on the dollar, when you could be making a heck of a lot more.
Have fun, and go make some money.
For more information, visit AffiliateMarketingDude.com.